In many enterprises, an employee can purchase products through the procurement infrastructure offered by the enterprise. The number of products offered through the procurement services of the enterprise may be extremely large. In order to manage all these effectively, all the products often are classified in certain categories, like IT products, marketing products, etc. These categories may include subcategories; for instance, IT products may include the categories Hardware, Software and Services. In this way, both the employees and the procurement department of the enterprise can manage the products lists more efficiently.
But problems may occur when someone purchases a product that is not listed in any of the previously mentioned categories. In this case the employee needs to add the category by herself. Most of the time, this is difficult and complicated, since the number of categories of products may be large and the difference between some of them may not be obvious. Then the employee may assign the product to the wrong category or even not assign it to any of them. This leads to a corruption in the hierarchical structure of the product categories. Even in the case where the user assigns a product to the correct category, it may take too long to navigate through the whole list and decide the corresponding category. In other cases, to alleviate the issue, the system defaults the category to Miscellaneous resulting in a large spend being categorized in the miscellaneous bucket or incorrectly classified due to human error.